OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target

(wsj.com)

96 points | by timr 2 hours ago

9 comments

  • bushbaba 1 hour ago
    Welp that’s not a good sign for the anthropic IPO. Curious what happens now that both OpenAI and Anthropic will face budgetary pressure. I don’t think they can raise prices, as it’d just open ppl to switch to Open source models.
    • jmspring 12 minutes ago
      The work going on to improve things on single card like a 3090 is nuts. HyperQwen, other things. I have my subscriptions, but always good to explore options.
    • indoorfish 53 minutes ago
      open weight, "how we trained it" is the open source of LLMs
    • j45 53 minutes ago
      They are two different companies
      • measurablefunc 51 minutes ago
        Selling the same product. It doesn't matter who is running the neural network, the utility derived from the neural network has nothing to do with the name of the company.
        • nemonemo 49 minutes ago
          No, they sell different products in the same category. You are basically saying Google and Bing as the same product when Bing is superior to Google search in some non-critical metrics.
          • derwiki 42 minutes ago
            Folks certainly have their preferences, but I think most consider each company's roughly equivalent models to be of the same quality.
          • vrganj 3 minutes ago
            I would also say that Google and Bing are roughly the same thing fwiw.
          • higginsniggins 43 minutes ago
            Because they are? Google and Bing are the same product - search engines. Just like Ford and Ferrari both sell cars, whether you think one is "better" or not.
            • jejeddd 25 minutes ago
              Stupid post. Microslop dedicated little resource to bing.

              Both OAI and Anthropic are rivals throwing immense resources in direct competition in producing the best product in the SAME CLASS.

              • bushbaba 11 minutes ago
                Better comparison is Pepsi vs coke or Home Depot vs Lowe’s.
        • yako21000 41 minutes ago
          Like, no name of a company must or has to have anything to do with the product itself.
  • xnx 57 minutes ago
    The end state is OpenAI as a division of Microsoft.
    • paaloeye 49 minutes ago
      At this rate ANT will end up as a division of Amazon
  • stuxnet79 56 minutes ago
    How does this affect OpenAI's prospects in the next few quarters?

    Unlike Anthropic, OAI does not have an S-1 to pore over. Their finances are shrouded in rumor and speculation. I can't assess how much of a death knell a ~15B financing shortfall is.

    • pestatije 45 minutes ago
      oh but that's nothing... consider all previous financing episodes and the companies involved
  • vedanshchauhan9 24 minutes ago
    If an open source model locally does one job correctly, lets say writing the code, then what really do we need OpenAI and Claude for? But I guess there might be some time in that.
    • tjpnz 0 minutes ago
      You won't. It will become something you install like a browser or password manager.
    • pixelatedindex 16 minutes ago
      That’s why the Mac mini and studio are selling like hotcakes. Massive unified memory with massive cpu performance, with a solid hardware. If I had 3-4K burning a hole in my pocket I know what I’d be getting.
  • seahawks78 1 hour ago
    Wow! Its bursting...
    • ssl-3 43 minutes ago
      The subheading in the article is telling, and doesn't appear to demonstrate anything I would describe as "bursting"

      > The ChatGPT maker’s latest funding round values it at $1.25 trillion, less than its $1.4 trillion target

      • jejeddd 27 minutes ago
        Fear is central which eventually will find its way in the public market.
  • vedanshchauhan9 29 minutes ago
    What else can you expect? Look the markets right now. Its bleeding. Started with China and now US.
  • minimaxa 32 minutes ago
    Not looking very good fellas, Bot Swarm breaches, microslop laying off 27% of their workforce.

    If you have a billion users and 90% + are freeloaders, you need social media style ads to support growth, which no one likes.

    Plus they are all out of data training sets, they are buying zombie companies for their data.

    There are dozens of distillated clones, which are getting better every release.

    The only moat is expensive data centre builds with on-loan Nvidia inference and the Chinese embargo fears.

    Good luck out there.

  • bronlund 1 hour ago
    No no no, don’t burst that AI bubble just yet. I haven’t finished all my side-projects.
    • paaloeye 48 minutes ago
      Use Ultra mode.
    • gessha 1 hour ago
      Once the bubble bursts we can finally sweep up the datacenter GPUs and jerry rig them to our home servers!
      • Avicebron 1 hour ago
        I literally can't wait.
      • __m 48 minutes ago
        They will probably go to other data centers or company premises.
      • kylehotchkiss 16 minutes ago
        The government will just nationalize them and use all the compute for poorly defined military tasks
        • vrganj 2 minutes ago
          Or to further build out total domestic surveillance, like they've been telegraphing.
      • tehlike 53 minutes ago
        After you upgrade your electric panel and cooling.
        • ssl-3 41 minutes ago
          Winter is coming.
    • simianwords 57 minutes ago
      Over last 3 years on HN I have seen such low quality comments : prophesizing the end of times - the bubble will burst and we will all be so happy after that.

      Any tiny news article that indicates even a modicum of challenges for OpenAI will be met with slurry of such comments.

      Perhaps it’s good to keep a good epistemic hygiene in all this. OpenAI isn’t going away anywhere soon. AI isn’t going away, in fact we haven’t even started yet.

      • red_green_yell 20 minutes ago
        It's a reaction to the constant drum beat of doom marketing:

        - "our product is too dangerous to release but we can't be bothered to prove its capabilities working in public hacking competitions" - "our product is going to kill everyone" - "our product is going to take all the jobs" - "we have a $40T addressable market" - "in a few days AI will be able to improve itself without human intervention and it's capabilities will hocky stick to infinity!!!"

        Followed by absurd financials that spin massive losses as "getting in on the ground floor" before historic profits arrive based on the doom marketing above.

        No one is saying AI is going away soon). But OpenAI and Anthro will go the way of Netscape when the market finally stops blindly accepting the doom marketing. Anyone with eyes can see LLMs will create historic increase in productivity among knowledge workers AND it will be a commodity. The massive profits frontier labs need to justify valuations are not coming.

        There are AI bears and AI bulls. It's easy to cherry pick extreme and clearly wrong statements from each. But if you actually believe the bears are the more extreme/wrong overall you just aren't paying attention to what the bulls are saying.

      • anonymous908213 52 minutes ago
        > OpenAI isn’t going away anywhere soon. AI isn’t going away

        You have conflated two completely unrelated concepts. LLMs aren't going anywhere, but what good does that do a company burning hundreds of billions to do 20% better than Chinese models trained with millions? The economics don't economic.

        • simianwords 47 minutes ago
          According to your argument, OpenAI should simply stop R and D which can result in massive jumps in performance because China may catch up?

          What is your prescription if I may ask? Don’t invest in research? Let China do it?

          • anonymous908213 24 minutes ago
            It's far too late for a prescription now because they're already committed to hundreds of billions in spending they don't have, but the reason Chinese companies will win the long game is because they are serious and the Americans are deeply unserious. From the beginning, Chinese labs have viewed LLMs as software tools and developed efficiently. Conversely, Americans are selling a fantasy about creating the machine god if they just throw another hundred billion at it every few months. Altman, Amodei, and Musk are all pathological liars who have oriented their entire companies around deceiving investors and marketing hype rather than engineering principles. They are unbelievably successful at what they set out to do, but what they set out to do was not to build a long-lasting foundation for success.
          • Spivak 18 minutes ago
            There's no should, only what economics incentivize. Right now we're not paying for the upfront training costs-it's great, the Millennial subsidy continues. But if, and big if right now, the infinite money font dries up and they have to recoup training investment direct from customers then that looks to be a huge price increase on the ground which makes cheap to train and good enough even more attractive than it already is.
          • jejeddd 29 minutes ago
            Can you read?
      • hsuduebc2 0 minutes ago
        Sometines it truly feels like titles of YouTube videos.
      • dartharva 46 minutes ago
        It is the α's and Z's brigading in with their over-emotional shortsighted groupthink.
    • dartharva 1 hour ago
      The consumer-level services you've gotten used to will still exist no matter how hard the bubble bursts, if it ever does. Way too many players now.
      • dweinus 1 hour ago
        Sure, but you'll have to pay for what it really costs
        • IncreasePosts 1 hour ago
          Inference will keep getting cheaper and cheaper though. Perhaps model releases will be fewer and farther between because these groups can't affording paying out a billion or more in training each generation
          • gpm 47 minutes ago
            Yeah, but Wright's law (cost of making the n^th something (like a token) being exponentially less than the cost of making the first) strongly suggests that post-bubble inference will be significantly cheaper the longer the bubble lasts.

            Whether that's a good thing considering the other things those dollars could be going towards...

          • kennywinker 49 minutes ago
            The chinese models are being trained for less than a million a pop.
          • Spivak 29 minutes ago
            I mean I'm happy for better but it might start grounding the industry where 1.6% better on some benchmarks doesn't justify hundred million investments.
        • taneq 57 minutes ago
          I thought the incremental supply cost per token wasn’t that high, and the main expense for these companies was the training they do on top of that?
        • dools 1 hour ago
          I have only ever paid per token for this reason: if I can’t generate sufficient value to cover the real cost I don’t want to invest in using it
        • dartharva 49 minutes ago
          .. which will be the same you are paying today. Token prices are already above their operating costs.

          If you're talking about free tiers, yes, that might change as marketing budgets will shrivel up.